can python easily be made truly 64-bit? (was Re: suse 9.1 and 64)

[Mike Coleman]

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:
> Unfortunately, Python still won't support sequence indexes above 2**31,
> so you still can't have lists with more than 2**31 items (but such a
> list would consume 8GB of main memory for the pointers to the list items
> alone, plus memory for the actual objects). More unfortunate is that
> it won't deal with strings larger than 2GB, either.

Speaking as someone who would use ~10GB strings and would like to mmap ~10GB
files (currently mmap is limited to int size, I think), these seem like
serious limitations.  Does anyone know whether there is a real reason for
these?  Or is it must a matter of someone thinking it's worthwhile to have
Python *really* be 64-bit (by replacing more or less all usage of int32 with
int64)?

Mike